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Telecommunications giant Verizon is upgrading its clouds. On Thursday, the company announced Verizon Cloud, a new infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform and object storage service, with a public beta launching in the fourth quarter.

The company said the new service provides "the agility and economic benefit of a generic public cloud along with the reliability and scale of an enterprise-level service." The service is composed of Verizon Cloud Compute, the IaaS platform, and Verizon Cloud Storage.

Cloud Compute offers virtual machines that Verizon said can be deployed in seconds, with users paying for what they use via credit card or purchase order on file. It offers user controls of such configurations as virtual machines, network performance and storage performance. The company says that it provides a finer level of control than other cloud offerings, in that a specific compute, memory or storage capacity can be requested, instead of just choosing from a menu of pre-set configurations.

Global IP Network

Cloud Storage is an object-addressable, multi-tenant storage platform, and Verizon said it does not have the latency issues that other storage services do. The new services are available through the Verizon Enterprise Solutions Web site.

To maintain personalized service during the beta phase, only a few hundred users will be allowed in the service each month, with additional capacity being added over time. Verizon said the service has been designed to eventually support millions of virtual machines. In the meantime, the company suggested that customers use the existing Verizon Enterprise Cloud, which was its initial IaaS service. For the indefinite future, both the Enterprise Cloud and the new services will be offered.

The initial deployment of the new services will be handled from Verizon's data center in Culpeper, Virginia, with additional installations by the middle of next year in Englewood, Colorado; Miami, Florida; Santa Clara, California, and in Amsterdam, London and Sao Paolo. The company said that its global IP network and enterprise-level security services also differentiate its offering from others.

$108 Billion by 2017

John Stratton, president of Verizon Enterprise Solutions, said in a statement that the new services are "the revolution in cloud services that enterprises have been calling for." He added that the company "took feedback from our enterprise clients across the globe and built a new cloud platform from the bottom up to deliver the attributes they require."

Verizon has some catching up to do in this market, which has been occupied for several years by Amazon, Google, Rackspace, Microsoft and others.

The public IT cloud services market, according to industry research firm IDC, is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of nearly 24 percent a year between now and 2017, 500 percent greater than the growth rate of the entire IT industry. Global spending is expected to reach $108 billion by 2017, from about $47 billion this year. Additionally, cloud spending is expected to propel about 17 percent of IT spending in such areas as system infrastructure software and servers.